For centuries, China has offered its people a chance to come to Beijing to petition the emperor directly to address grievances.

But starting Monday, Chinese officials offered a new way for those not inclined to make the trip: petition online. That makes the process more convenient, said officials who spoke to state media, and allows them to track the process of their pleas.

As it turned out, progress was scant: The website crashed on the first day. While it came back online Monday afternoon, the morning failure triggered mockery across China’s social media platforms, including the popular Twitter-like Sina Weibo microblogging service.

“Sorry! Weibo brought too many people to the page,” said Li Kaifu, CEO of Innovation Works, who has more than 46 million followers on the site.

Many Weibo users said they expected the crash due to the number of potential petitioners. Some interpreted the government’s use of a server that couldn’t handle the first-day traffic as a sign of insincerity.

Petitioning, or shangfang, is the modern form of an ancient system in which people who faced injustice at home came to the capital to voice their grievances directly to the emperor.The State Bureau for Letters and Calls acts as a communication channel for petitioners and the central government. While the bureau has long been criticized for a lack of effectiveness, local officials often go out of their way to keep petitioners from reaching it so as to avoid being criticized by Beijing. Hired thugs often threaten protesters or even haul them away to unofficial prisons known as black jails.

Many of China’s Internet users argued that the online petitioning system, like its real-world counterpart, both suffers limitations and offers avenues for abuse. Online petitioners have to register with their verified information including national identification number, potentially exposing them to retribution. Additionally, the site only works on Internet Explorer and limits the amount of supporting materials that can be uploaded to a paltry two megabytes for each case.

“Isn’t it easier for local officials to suppress complaints and take revenge?” said one Weibo user.

The bureau chief of SBLC promised in an interview with the official Xinhua news agency that every case made through the new online service would garner a response.

An editorial in the Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily, on the other hand, questioned whether the online service would evolve into an excuse for local officials to keep the petitioners from going to Beijing. It also asked whether the bureau will do more than simply passing on the complaints to local officials without any further accountability.

In a potentially not-good sign for responsiveness, China Real Time’s attempts to call the only phone number on the bureau’s website ended with a recording that said the number didn’t exist.

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com.